Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was born on February 4, 1881, in Argentan, France where his father raised cattle. After apprenticing with an architect in Caen from 1897 to 1899, Léger settled in Paris in 1900 and supported himself as an architectural draftsman. He applied to the École des Beaux-Arts and was rejected. Nevertheless he attended classes there beginning in 1903 as a non-enrolled student and also studied at the Académie Julian. He began to work seriously as a painter at the age of 25.
Léger’s earliest-known works, which date from 1905, were primarily influenced by Impressionism. The experience of seeing the Paul Cézanne retrospective at the 1907 Salon d’Automne and his contact with the early Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had a significant impact on the development of his style—it focused the artist more on drawing and geometry. His critics would label his personal style of Cubism as ‘Tubism’ due to its emphasis on cylindrical forms. From 1911 to 1914 Léger’s work became increasingly abstract, and he started to limit his palette to the primary colors and black & white. In 1912 he was given his first solo show at Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris.
Léger served in the military from 1914 to 1917 producing sketches of artillery pieces, airplanes and fellow soldiers in the trenches. The war years had a significant impact on him as he renounced abstraction and claimed to have discovered the beauty of common objects, which he described as 'everyday poetic images'. He began painting in a clean and precise ‘mechanical’ style, in which boldly colored objects are set against cool whites and defined in their simplest terms, using cityscapes and machine forms as his subject matter.
Léger made three visits to the United States in the 1930s. New York impressed the artist as he wrote to friend Le Corbusier: "I'm still constantly astonished by the vertical urge of these people drunk with architecture. From my room on the thirtieth floor, the night is the most astonishing spectacle in the world, nothing can be compared to it....This city is infernal. A mixture of elegance and toughness."
In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Art Institute of Chicago held exhibitions of his work. Léger lived in the United States from 1940 to 1945 where he taught at Yale University and Mills College but returned to France after the war.
In the decade before his death, Léger’s wide-ranging projects included book illustrations, monumental figure paintings and murals, stained-glass windows, mosaics, polychrome ceramic sculptures, and set & costume designs. In 1955 he won the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Bienal. Léger died on August 17 of that year at his home in Gif-sur-Yvette, France. The Musée Fernand Léger was inaugurated in 1960 in Biot, France.
Léger's influence can be found in the works of Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Milton Resnick, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Lindner, Arshile Gorky, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Brice Marsden, Frank Stella, Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist, among others. In May 2008, a Leger painting 'Study for a Woman in Blue' set an auction record for the artist selling for $39.2 million dollars--bidding between only two bidders.
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